Dorothy Nevill

I'm just back from speaking at the Cheltenham Literary Festival where yesterday was definitely 'Gardening Women' day.

First off was Jekka McVicar, queen of the herb garden. It was Jekka who broke Beth Chatto's record of ten consequtive gold medals at Chelsea before retiring from exhibiting in the main marquee. Instead as well as running her highly successful nursery, she's been writing and the audience pounced on her new cookbook using herbs.

Women growing herbs was one of the questions that came up during my session. This is, of course, one of the oldest forms of gardening that women have been involved. Yet during the eighteenth century, women became increasingly marginalised from herbal medicine as the medical profession became 'institutionlised', excluding female practitioners. Amazingly the growing of herbs fell out of favour until the 1920s and 1930s when one woman revived their popularity. Mrs Hilda Leyel was the public face of herbalism in the interwar years. She was the force behind the Society of Herbalists which started a year after she opened the first Culpeper shop in London.

In my session, there was lots of chat about sex and scandal - not botanical interbreeding but the fascinating lives of two of my 'horticultural women', Lady Anne Monson and Lady Dorothy Nevill. Plenty of lively debate and excellent questions ranging from seventeenth-century nursery-women to Beatrix Havergal who ran the Waterperry School of Horticulture to the trials of being a female head gardener today.

After me, the delicious James Alexander Sinclair interviewed Gardener's World presenter, Carol Klein, in front of a rapt audience. From the time she shared a bath with John Lennon to filming a year at Glebe Cottage, Carol entertained everyone giving encouragement to all to 'get out and propagate'!

Off to Guildford next week for my last 'litfest' of the year. I'll miss them - they are such a great way to met like souls and swap stories about favourite gardening women. Hopefully lots will follow this blog and keep the comments coming.

For more years than she'd probably care to remember along with marvellous interviews with all the local glitterati, Ruth Gorb wrote the gardening column in the Hampstead & Highgate Express. All us keen gardeners would devour it for she always knew about the best gardens long before they appeared in the NGS's Yellow Book.

Nowadays, Ruth Gorb writes for the Camden New Journal/Islington Tribune and I was delighted to be interviewed by her about Gardening Women.

Joan Stokes of Waterperry School of Horticulture with her prize-winning strawberries (Photograph Valerie Finnis:RHS)

Published: 20 May 2010
by RUTH GORB

THE title says it all. “Women Gardeners” would have been soft,
friendly, ordinary. But “Gardening Women” are strong, a force to reckon
with, as they prove themselves in a fascinating new book. From the 17th
century Mary, Duchess of Beaufort – (“Gard’ning,” they said of her
disapprovingly, “took up two-thirds of her time”) – to the
spade-wielding goddesses of 21st-century television, women have been at
the forefront of our horticultural tradition.

But, says the book’s author, Catherine Horwood, their importance has
been lost along the way. “It’s like men are chefs and women are cooks.
If you ask anyone if they can give you the names of great women
gardeners in the past, you’ll be very lucky if they come up with Vita
Sackville-West, and maybe Gertrude Jekyll. But there are so many, and
their contribution is so great…I want to reclaim them.”

The book represents a culmination of Catherine Horwood’s two great
passions – gardening and women’s history. She is not a trained garden
historian but a social historian – “so my book is about people”. She
became an academic after raising three daughters; her PhD became her
first book, Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class Between the Wars,
which was followed by a humorous look at Worst Fashions, What We
Shouldn’t Have Worn, But Did. Her most recent book is Potted History:
The Story of Plants in the Home.

She is honorary research fellow at the Bedford Centre for the History
of Women at Royal Holloway.

She is no mean gardening woman herself, creator of a prize-winning
garden in Haverstock Hill, open to the public for many years, and now of
a stunning roof garden overlooking Primrose Hill. She learned about
gardening from her mother, the most romantic of women (a childhood spent
in Rupert Brooke’s Old Vicarage in Grant­chester, a ballerina beloved
of a Russian prince ) whose love of beauty found its expression in her
gardens.

What is this special relationship women have with gardening? It goes
back originally to caring for the family, growing medicinal herbs and
strewing scented plants in often less than fragrant houses. More
well-heeled ladies found an outlet for their creative energies in
designing and botanizing, spending huge amounts of money on stocking
their gardens and greenhouses – the great 19th-century beauty Louisa
Lawrence had 500 varieties of roses, 600 species of herbaceous plants,
and 227 varieties of orchids in the grounds of her home near Ealing. Her
much older husband, it is hardly surprising, lived in a separate house,
surrounded by his books and wine.

Gardening women were feisty, often unconventional. Lady Mary Coke,
married off in 1748 and regretting it almost immediately, left her
husband, bought a villa in Notting Hill, cut down trees to open the view
towards Hampstead and Highgate, and hired a woman weeder to come and
clear the kitchen garden – for economic (cheap labour) rather than
feminist reasons. The glamorous Edwardian hostess Norah Lindsay, in her
fifties and with a failed marriage behind her, became the most sought
after garden designer in London society. Her daughter Nancy inherited
her mother’s horticultural talent but blotted her copybook when on a
plant-hunting expedition in Persia “when she was delayed too long in a
silken tent.”

Nearer home, a century earlier, Lady Dorothy Nevill spent rather too
long in a summer house with a well-known rake, was ostracised from
respectable society and obviously didn’t give a damn. She set about
amassing a huge collection of plants that became so well-known that it
attracted the attention of Charles Darwin. She provided him with an
insecti­vorous plant that got him so excited that he wrote to her that
“I have hardly enjoyed a day more in my life”.

But between the grand ladies and the working-class “weeding women”
there was a growing army of middle-class women whose contrib­ution to
horticulture was inestimable. There was Gertrude Jekyll who more than
anyone changed the whole style of gardening in this country. Much has
already been written about her, but Catherine Horwood has managed to
unearth one particularly poignant incident. A group of young
horticultural students were taken to see the great lady at her home, and
were told to each pick something they liked. Jekyll was by this time
completely blind. “One by one we put our bits of plants in her hands.
She felt them and smelt them and then without hesitation named them…”

There has been, as in all other areas, a good deal of sexual
discrimination in the gardening world. Lady Anne Monson, an 18th-century
botanist hugely admired in her profession, was not accepted in English
society because she had an illegitimate child. It took years for women
to be made head gardeners on grand estates or given posts in the
horticultural establishment. As late as the 1960s there were no women on
the council of the Royal Horticultural Society. Why? Because “there
never had been ladies on the council and there were none at present who
had as useful experience as the men available”. Arrant nonsense as
Catherine Horwood’s book resoundingly and delightfully proves.

There is a difference in what men and women contribute to gardening,
and one has to say “vive la difference”. Men, says Dr Horwood, tend to
look at the grand picture, the lay-out of a garden – that’s when they
are not being obsessive about one plant, such as dahlias. For women,
gardening is a nurturing process, which often blossoms when children are
grown and gone. As the great gardening woman Beth Chatto says: “You
can’t go on having babies, but you can nurture life.”

Any feminist worth her salt will tell you that, until recently, women have rarely received the attention they deserve in the history books. This was especially the case with gardening, an area often regarded as an all-male domain. Catherine Horwood's Gardening Women is the latest offering in a short string of recent women-focused garden history books. Wide-ranging and meticulously researched, it delivers far more than its title suggests. Not just a simple history of 'female gardening folk', it sheds light on the many pioneering women who have made their mark on botany and plant research, garden design and landscape architecture, garden writing and education, and the floral arts. Spanning four centuries, it is particularly strong in describing the lives and contributions of 19th- and 20th-century women, exploring the 'how' and also the 'why' of each of their stories. Some of these gardening greats you will certainly know, such as Gertrude Jekyll, Penelope Hobhouse and Carol Klein. Others, though lesser known, are equally deserving of fame and equally formidable.

Did you know, for instance, that it was thanks to the studies of insect-mad Eleanor Ormerod (1828-1901) that the RHS was able to establish a number of the causes of insect damage to plants? Or, that by donating species to Charles Darwin, horticulturist and plant collector Lady Dorothy Nevill (1826-1914) was an essential help to his studies? Many more fascinating tales are retold in this eye-opening survey.